


The little engine.

by orange_crushed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Near Future, Non-Graphic Violence, Post-Season/Series 09, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2014-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-09 16:40:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1990110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He, uh," Sam says. "He just needs space, I think."</p>
<p>"Of course," Castiel says. His own voice sounds like it is a million miles away. "I understand." It’s an outrageous lie, the kind of thing he is learning that people tell all the time, because they must, to keep afloat. He does not understand. He does not understand at all. He does not actually like the flaxseed bread Sam buys. He is almost never fine.</p>
<p>He pins the postcard on the board in the library and then goes into the bathroom to splash water on his face. He runs the tap and puts his hands over his eyes but he still sees them, sees the handwriting and the smudge where the ink was still wet, where the skin sat across it and drew it over the paper, the last mark, the proof of life, the only touch he’s had in months, this ghostly impression of an absent hand.</p>
<p>  <i>I’m not coming back.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

There are postcards, sometimes. Little paper rectangles printed in color and stamped with different postmarks, state by state by state. Wisconsin and Michigan, Tennessee. Florida. Nothing for two months and then Nevada, then Texas, a postcard with a cartoon of a pig riding a bull, wearing a ten-gallon hat.

"It’s humorous," Castiel says. "I think that’s good." Sam looks at him sideways and Castiel feels embarrassed, his ridiculous thoughts exposed. He probably shouldn’t have said anything, but now he feels compelled to explain. "That he’s- if he’s laughing at things, that’s good," he says, awkwardly. He hands the card to Sam, watches Sam turn it over, crack the thinnest smile at the ugly drawing, and hand it back. "Isn’t it?"

"Texas," Sam shrugs. "Sure."

"At least he’s getting closer." Castiel pins the card to the library wall, next to the map, puts a thumbtack where the postmark originated. He stands back to look at the pins becoming a pattern, a path. "He’s looping around. Do you-"

"I don’t know," Sam says. "Maybe."

"I think," Castiel says, slowly, pretending it is an idea and not a wish. "I think he’s coming home."

But then the silence again, a month that is four weeks, thirty days, hundred of minutes in which Castiel does the dishes and sweeps the floors and answers the emergency lines and runs outside in the path through the woods, chest heaving and legs aching and pollen in his hair, hours when he reads or labels the files in the archives or sorts through the guns and cleans them and puts them back on the hooks in Dean’s room. The dresser was shattered into too many pieces; in the end they just burned it, and the chair. But the bed was fixable, and so Castiel fixed it. Fixed the joint and sanded the whole thing down and stained it fresh. Sam helped. Castiel didn’t mind the work. He’s had time. Months of postcards. Days and weeks of nothing in between.

Then there is one from Alaska, and at last, this one has writing on the back, a message, where all the rest were blank. Castiel scans the words and it’s as if his eyes won’t see them, won’t make them into sense. They stay letters, signs. He holds the postcard in front of his face and his eyes are hot, burning, his face feels flushed; Sam takes it out of his hands and reads it and then looks at Castiel.

"He, uh," Sam says. "He just needs space, I think."

"Of course," Castiel says. His own voice sounds like it is a million miles away. "I understand." It’s an outrageous lie, the kind of thing he is learning that people tell all the time, because they must, to keep afloat. He does not understand. He does not understand at all. He does not actually like the flaxseed bread Sam buys. He is almost never fine.

He pins the postcard on the board in the library and then goes into the bathroom to splash water on his face. He runs the tap and puts his hands over his eyes but he still sees them, sees the handwriting and the smudge where the ink was still wet, where the skin sat across it and drew it over the paper, the last mark, the proof of life, the only touch he’s had in months, this ghostly impression of an absent hand.

_I’m not coming back._

Castiel goes up to the roof of the bunker, up the spiral emergency stairs to the hatch. He opens it and winces as it squeals on ancient hinges, and sets it back carefully after he’s gone up. He doesn’t need Sam to follow him up here, ask what he’s doing, if he needs a hand with the solar panels they installed a month ago after a back-up generator failed. Everywhere there are small improvements, signs of life and progress, projects, tasks to do. They’ve stayed busy. They’ve made contact with a few hunter networks, tested out their tracking grids, their comm stations. They’ve remained sharp. They have been prepared, waiting to fling open the doors and open their arms and say we were waiting, we knew, we knew you were coming, we were busy but we were ready, welcome back, welcome back, welcome home- Castiel rips a handful of tiny weeds out of a crack in the masonry where the shell of the bunker meets the rising hill, he crushes their minute, fragile stems in his palm and yells upwards, helplessly, into the air, “ _Motherfucker fuckdamn son of a bitch!_ ” He closes his eyes and puts his other hand against his forehead to shield himself from the glare; the sun is hot and high and his eyes are stinging again, everything’s suddenly too bright and too futile and too small, the world is too small and he is even smaller, a dot on a map that is rapidly shrinking out of sight. 

He crouches down and sits there alone for a long time. Eventually he uncurls his clenched hands and looks into them, at the crushed little plants he’s still holding, the green stains and smears where they have broken into their component pieces, tiny cells and moisture and minute fibers scraped apart, their soft vulnerable insides pulped and ruined. He almost feels like crying. He is humiliated at having come up here to have a tantrum, to explode like a ridiculous human child and now to be left empty and raw but still angry, still unsatisfied. His body and his mind do these things, make him run into the woods sometimes or close a door and sit behind it for hours. He doesn’t know what he will do if Dean never comes back: if his body and his mind will make him stay here, anchored by vain hope, or if his body and his mind will give up, let him drift into the wind like a dried blade of grass, hoping for nothing. Castiel stands on the roof long after the sun has started to sink below the trees.

He climbs down after a while, finds Sam sitting at the table in the library with a mug of coffee. Sam looks up when he comes in, and Castiel means to say something, but the words die in his throat, melt back into him like fallen snow. He stands there with his hands at his sides and says nothing. He wonders if Sam knows what he is thinking, if he is so transparent, more like a cloud than a man. If Sam knows everything, after all.

Sam stares at him and after a second, he smiles.

"Go," he says. "If you want to, you should."

"I don’t want to leave you on your own," says Castiel. 

"It’s okay," Sam says. "I’ll be plenty busy here." Castiel is ashamed- of course he will be. They’ve been fielding calls from solo hunters, waystations and safe houses, a handful of stray angels who stayed behind. There’s always someone who needs the text for a spell, a quick search through the archives for a strange symbol. He’d be abandoning Sam with all of it, walking out again on someone who needs him. "Hey," Sam says. "Don’t make that face. I’m not saying-"

"Never mind," Castiel says. "I’ll check the messages. Or I can go into town for groceries. We’re out of eggs."

"Cas," Sam says.

"There’s a farm stand on the county line that has brown eggs, the ones you pref-"

"Forget the fucking eggs," Sam says, and Castiel stops rambling. Sam gets up and stands in front of him, ducks ever so slightly to get Castiel to look him in the eyes. It works a little too well. "Seriously, go," he says. "I can handle things here. Until you come back. Okay?"

"Okay," Castiel echoes. Sam pats him on the shoulder and Castiel feels absurdly grateful for it, for everything. "I will come back," he blurts out, before he can pull himself together. "I’ll come back. I’ll bring him back."

"Yeah," Sam says. He leaves his hand on Castiel’s shoulder for a second, squeezes there and then lets him go. He’s still smiling. "I know you will."

 

 

 

 

Castiel takes his own car, a dull dun-colored Volvo that he stole out of a used car lot in Mankato almost ten months ago. It seems longer. He’d been human again for only five days before he stole this car, already acclimated to boxy old sedans with poor rear visibility, already prepared to strip wires and jump-start and drive away under cover of night, to sleep at a rest stop in the front seat, curled under his jacket, heartsick and cold and still mostly delirious. They’d been hunting Dean. All of them: Sam, and the angels, and Castiel. But not together. His grace had been burned out and he had nearly died, and Hannah had scraped him up and healed his body and tried to make him give it up, give up his fruitless, hopeless, dangerous crusade. Now that he was human for good, weak and ailing, no use to anyone.

"He has to be saved," he’d said, delirious with fever, seeing Dean on the ceiling above the bed, dark-eyed and silent, vanishing into mist. Hannah had shaken her head. Sympathetic, but not understanding. Not agreeing. 

"He has to be stopped," she’d replied. And she’d posted a guard on his hospital room and gone to hunt Dean, and Castiel had pulled the IV from his body and bloodied the wall and banished everybody, and run through the streets of town barefoot in a janitor’s uniform, looking for a car to steal. Now he keeps a battered wallet of CDs in the glove compartment, things he has picked up at whim in the Goodwill in Lebanon or the bargain bins of the WalMart in Fairbury, bands with names like En Vogue and The B-52s, one called the Moody Blues that he chose because it made him think of the night sky fading from evening to midnight, the low dark blue of the day in retreat, a color of changes. He likes the music alright, but the color a little more, still. He keeps a hunting duffel in the trunk under a devil’s trap drawn in spray paint, and also some bottled water, granola bars, beef jerky, a sleeping bag with a broken zipper. He’s put some other things in the back for this journey: dried fruit and nuts, a couple of changes of clothes, road flares and a battery-powered radio. Jugs of water. A shovel, in case he has to dig the car out. Sam suggested a parka and so he found one of those at a sporting goods store on the way to Montana. It’s got more pockets than any coat Castiel has ever owned. When he wears it he feels like a bear that’s climbed inside to hibernate.

He drives for long stretches, hours and hours until his legs feel stiff and his eyes weaken and the horizon starts to blur; when that happens he finds a place to pull over and he eats a granola bar and falls asleep for a couple of hours, sometimes with the parka pulled over his head to block the sunshine, a bird with a cloth over its cage, his own invented night. He calls Sam when he drives through towns that have familiar names.

"There’s also a Calgary in Scotland," he tells Sam, standing outside of the car in front of a fast-food restaurant, drinking another coffee. His second of the day. "It’s considerably less populated."

"Did you see the old Olympic stadiums?"

"No."

"Ah," Sam says. "Just wondered." But there’s something in it, a shard of something that Castiel thinks might be better, if it were worked free. He asks why Sam would bring it up. "No reason, just- I don’t really remember it. I was too little. But Dean wanted to watch the games. He kept begging dad to get us a better motel, a place that’d have a color tv."

"Did he?"

"What do you think?" Sam says.

And so Castiel drives up to the Olympic park on his way out of the city, pulls into the lot and gets out and stares up at the slopes, dotted here and there with tiny figures moving across the snow, the thin lines and rails of ski lifts and ramps, the scrub bushes and low trees poking through in dusty patches, the whole thing a vast upward plain crowding towards the clouds. He could pay to get in, walk around, but he’s saving his cash. Instead he walks the perimeter, the edge of the fences, bends down to pick up pebbles and sift them through his fingers. He finds one that’s soft to the touch, rounded smooth by the effort of a thousand years of stream water somewhere, pretty and veined with color, a tawny pink, fine as an eggshell. It occurs to him, holding that stone in the curl of his palm, feeling it slowly warming, that perhaps he shouldn’t arrive empty-handed.

Castiel puts it in his pocket. Castiel gets back into the car, and aims himself north.

 

 

 

 

Castiel stops in Whitehorse for a night because he’s tired, because there hasn’t been much besides truck stops and sink baths and the back seat of the car for a couple of days. He parks himself in a corner booth of a diner and drinks tea instead of coffee, hoping to fall asleep before nine in his musty motel bed, to go without nightmares, to make his eyes stop itching and watering with exhaustion. He eats the pot roast special and when the waitress brings him a second basket of rolls, smiling, unasked, he says thank you from the bottom of his heart. He means to get up after he’s eaten but he can’t seem to rouse himself enough to move off the plastic bench seat. Instead he sits there for a little while, as the other late diners file out one by one, and studies the tourist cards on a little rack by the table. His waitress catches him reading one for the hot springs.

"You oughta go," she says. She looks him up and down, at the remains of the second empty bread basket, the purpling circles under his eyes. "Do you good."

In the morning he checks out and stands in the cold air watching the sun color the tops of trees and the bottoms of clouds, touching their faint edges with a thin golden line as delicate as a thread, a line of spiderweb. His shoulders ache from sitting in the driver’s seat; his knees will be complaining by nightfall. He doesn’t know how they did this for so many years, even with younger bodies, lighter souls. He doesn’t mind the solitude, he doesn’t mind the scenery: he minds the pace, the held-off adrenaline of the chase, wheels tracing hundreds of miles that he could have spanned in a second. Bread takes time to rise, flowers take time to grow: Castiel has no wish to rush nature. But he is not exactly natural. He longs to be swifter. And besides. There is a phantom in the place he occupies. A shape that shadows him in the lengthening hours and days, nights and noontimes: switching the stations through his hands, correcting the steering. A memory of fingers drumming the beat on the steering wheel. When Castiel dreams in the back of the car under the parka it’s this, over and over: the windows down and air shaking his collar, eyes meeting in the rear-view mirror, his body warm against the seat. He is everywhere, nowhere. There are not so many car windows in the world that Castiel has stopped looking into them reflexively, unconsciously or subconsciously. The places are different, wherever he goes: the mountains younger and sharper, the air stinging, the sky cold and vast. Only the road is the same. Calling up the same restless echoes.

He stuffs his bag into the car and goes to the hot springs after all, on a whim: he lies in the pool, submerged to the neck, and watches steam spin in the air at the level of the water, soft tendrils like the skin of plants, a beckoning curl of leaves. His body feels weightless and clean, his cheeks flushed, his blood like wine. When he stands up he can feel the air against him, solid, like a pair of hands.

He buys a t-shirt at the front desk and puts it on over his henley, under his coat. It’s soft and warm. He’ll bring it with him. A girl hands him his change and says, “Come back again when you’re passing through.”

"I’d like that," he says. He would: he likes the water and the open sky spread lush above it, the slow creep of comfort that sinks in from flesh to bone, the lightness of his thoughts, so like the steam. He’s still finding things to appreciate, preferences, a process of discovery: ways he likes to be. He is newly aware that next time, he doesn’t want to be alone. He calls Sam when he’s crossed the border again, still five hours from Fairbanks, pulled over at the side of the road. His phone is cutting in and out, he almost never has a signal. "It was a Fairbanks postmark," he says. "But that was almost two weeks ago, it doesn’t mean-"

"It’s a long shot," Sam agrees. "But what else can you do?"

The story of my life, Castiel thinks. He is fairly sure that’s the right expression.

 

 

 

 

Fairbanks is a city of streets: broad four-lane avenues that run slow arcs around the center. He reaches it just before dawn. In the early grey darkness, under a shroud of gathering rainclouds, he loops past the few motels and more expensive hotels, checking their parking lots for the one thing Dean didn’t leave behind. A broad river snakes through the city, cutting it in half, and Castiel catches glimpses of cold crawling water as he crosses the bridges, back and forth, increasingly tired and desperate, increasingly sure that there is nothing here to find. He is coasting along, trying to think of what he might try next: a missing persons report, with a made-up name from one of Dean’s old ID cards? He’s got a picture of Dean in his wallet, a face-forward picture from a CVS photo stand that was supposed to be for a fake passport, once, in some forgotten time. Sam gave it to him, picked it carefully out of a thin envelope of photographs that Sam had been keeping somewhere in his room. Castiel hadn’t asked to look inside it, but he caught a glimpse before Sam folded it carefully back up and took it away again, like a librarian hoarding some rare manuscript, guarding a finite resource. Castiel understands. But he doesn’t think he should involve the police: nobody has come at them with a warrant lately, but that doesn’t mean there are none left on the books. Maybe he could try the diners, the supermarkets. The liquor stores. Fairbanks, unlike much of the state, isn’t dry. And Dean might not be, either.

Castiel’s stomach growls. Loudly. Diners first, then. 

The first one he stops at doesn’t have a dessert case. He wonders if that means he can rule it out. He gets an order of fries and takes them back out to the car, where he eats them in greasy handfuls out of a paper bag. Castiel drinks the black coffee he ordered and wonders if Dean still indulges his sweet tooth, if he’s enjoying the taste of food again, if he’s allowed himself that. It would be like Dean to deny himself those simple pleasures as some kind of punishment: it would be like Dean to long for them, regardless. Castiel scratches at his neck and finishes his coffee. He hasn’t shaved in a week and his face itches. He wonders what it would be like to grow it out, wear a beard like so many men do, here. He wonders if he would like the way his face looked, the way his neck stayed warm. If he would feel differently about himself in the mirror. If it is even possible to look the way he feels, however that is. 

He drives circles and stops in half a dozen places: eats a meal in four or five parts over the better part of the afternoon. He is still hoarding the roll of cash in his coat, peeling off dollar bills one by one for a cup of hot tea with free refills, a cup of soup instead of a bowl. He’s shown the picture a couple of times, in likely spots, without any luck. He is thinking about finding a place to stay for the night, someplace warm if not particularly clean, when he spots it: a sign on the side of a building, trimmed in tiny electric lights. Christmas tree lights, though it’s not Christmas: people are not strict about these things, he knows. The sign makes him pause. Loose Moose Café. There is a cartoon of that animal on the sign, knock-kneed and gangling, with skyscraper legs. Castiel thinks about the inane postcard of the pig: about wanting to laugh again. He pulls into the lot.

At his table, when a smiling woman brings him a bratwurst made of buffalo meat, he holds out the photograph of Dean. He tries not to let his hand shake. 

"He’s a veteran," Castiel says. "My friend. He’s having trouble adjusting." His waitress puts one hand over her heart and takes the picture with the other. "I need to know," Castiel says, and then he can’t finish, the words don’t quite come out. His human voice, his human lungs, seize up for a second, and then release. "If you’ve seen him," Castiel says. "Please." She looks at Dean’s face and then back at Castiel, at his scruffy beard and plain coat. Her eyes search him. Castiel waits.

"I’ve seen him," she says, finally. "Three, four days ago he was in here. I remember he asked me for a pen."

"A pen?" Castiel says. 

"He was writing a postcard," she says. "I saw the picture on it. From the hot springs, up in Chena."

"Thank you," Castiel says. He’s already standing up, knocking his chair back awkwardly, patting his pockets for cash. His heart’s trembling. His head’s light. "Thank you."

"Honey," she says. "You gonna want this to go?"

He heads east out of the city, barreling down the single-lane road towards the hot springs. In half an hour a rainstorm has opened up overhead, torn out of the lingering clouds at last, cold and heavy as a sheet of steel. The storm blots out the sun, pulls the shade of night over the early evening. He can barely see the pines that border the road, and the Volvo’s shitty windshield wipers scrape and whine. A pair of headlights creep up behind him and sit a little too close to the bumper, wavering in the rear-view mirrors, casting blinding glare into his eyes. Castiel rubs one hand over his face and hangs onto the steering wheel with the other, trying not to veer too far over the line on either side. The headlights get closer, inching up, and then back away. After another half-mile, they disappear.

He doesn’t know what he’ll say at Chena, if the same story will work twice. Doesn’t know what he’ll do if they say yes, if they say no. He’s so close. This is what he’s thinking- _close, close, closer_ \- when something slams into the back of the car and sends it skidding across the wet road, heaving up onto one side for a second and then landing again, still moving, tires ripping in the grit of the shoulder. Castiel turns into the spin, trying to get traction, but there’s a second hit, ramming straight into the back left wheel, whipping him back and forth against the steering column. His face slams into the wheel and for a second there’s nothing, no sound, no light, and then a rush of noise as the car slides down the embankment and tips down, rolling fast, and hammers into a tree trunk with a final, flattening crush. 

_I’m not coming back._

Sometimes when Castiel tries to sleep he can see Dean, dipped to his elbows in blood: blood so hot it was still steaming, steaming like the surface of the hot springs, soft curls that disappeared into the air. In his dreams, in the dark behind his eyes, Dean holds those hands out and Castiel takes them, and doesn’t let go.

For a long time after that, there’s nothing at all.

 

 

.


	2. Chapter 2

Consciousness is a long time coming: for a while he swims below the surface of it, dipping his head into the air to feel the cold, to watch shapes moving past along a darkened shore. But then he is awake, shaken into awareness with a jolt of pain, dizzy and blinded, head throbbing, mouth dry, blinking hard against the bare bulb overhead. It’s too much. He wants to be under again, quieted, gone. His eyes can’t quite focus but he can feel the sweat between his wrists, the raw rub of twine.

"Morning, precious," says a voice he doesn’t recognize. "Sleep okay?" Castiel blinks and shakes his head from side to side, tries to center his eyes on the shape in front of him. It’s a man in a canvas barn coat, muddied jeans. Black eyes and a half-grown beard, a thin sunburned neck poking out from his t-shirt. He looks like a trucker, wearing a face Castiel doesn’t know. Except, yes. He’s seen it before. At a corner table at some diner, pretending to study the specials board. He was there, somewhere. Lost and unnoticed. Castiel feels a swell of rage directed at himself: he should have seen, he should have been more cautious, he should have recognized, except that he can’t anymore, he doesn’t, he isn’t that creature any longer, the thing that would have known. He was too eager, too caught in his own thoughts, a salmon leaping for a net. The man pokes him with the tip of one boot. "Come on," he says. "Don’t be like that." Castiel doesn’t say anything. He is just a man now, making a man’s mistakes: but one that will not beg. He looks across the room, at the woman leaning in the doorway. Her ponytail is pulled through the back of a baseball cap.

"There’s an easy way and a hard way," she says. "But you already know that, Castiel."

"I don’t know you," he says. It comes out in a croak. She smiles at him, nods like they’re being formally introduced.

"Friend of a friend," she says. "I think you remember my old boss. Sharp dresser, yea high?" She puts one hand up, level with her shoulders. "I heard you guys used to be tight, before you let Dean Winchester saw his head off."

"Crowley."

"Got it in one," she says. She pushes off the wall and crosses the room, leans down to put her fingers against his battered face, tilt it towards the light. Castiel swallows his gasp, and she pats his cheek. "Poor little angel," she says. "It’s not you we want, of course. You’re just our GPS."

"No," he says.

"No?" She raises an eyebrow. "You haven’t even heard the offer. It’s pretty good."

"I will not help you," he says. 

“ _I will not help you_ ,” she parrots. She glances at the other demon, who is scratching his ankle with one foot. He shrugs. “Jesus,” she says. “You were right about this guy.”

"Angels," he says. "They’re all assholes."

"I’m not-"

"Oh, don’t worry, kiddo, we know," she says, and pats his head. She curls her fingers into Castiel’s hair, tugs upwards until he’s forced to meet her eyes. His bruised neck is screaming. He doesn’t know how strong he is, anymore. Probably not very. She rubs a slow circle with her thumb, along the ridge of his scalp, almost tenderly. "We know."

 

 

 

 

They leave him alone after a little while, when they’re bored of hurting him. They don’t ask a lot of questions. They want to know where Dean is, if Castiel has an exact location. He doesn’t. They seem to believe him, but that doesn’t make them stop. They know they’re close: Dean was spotted somewhere in the Yukon weeks ago, and they’ve been circling up in this direction since then. Spotting Castiel was a bonus, a freebie. A gift from a fickle universe, a second set with purchase. Castiel watches infomercials late at night on motel television sets, when the dreams are too much: smiling people holding up scratchproof bakeware, bags that collapse all your superfluous belongings, jewelry that looks like jumbled fistfuls of plastic rubies. They comfort him sometimes when he can’t sleep, the rituals of human life and human necessity and even human greed, the human longing for order in the midst of chaos and agony, a desire for spice racks, matching drapes. For love. And barring love, cohesion. He tries to vanish into the inanity of those scripted pleasantries. _Made my life so much easier_ , such a timesaver. Everything in one simple package. Just call now, an operator is standing by. He doesn’t pray anymore. His mouth doesn’t fit the words he used to use, to call out the name of God. But he can’t be silent, he can’t. Humans aren’t built for it. Inside the pain he thinks, _but wait_. It is the thinnest hope. But wait. There’s more.

They turn the light off when they leave, with Castiel’s phone in their hands. He hasn’t labeled the numbers for exactly this reason, but there are only five: one that Dean no longer answers, and Sam, Hannah, a hunter who has taught himself Enochian with Castiel’s help, an angel who is living in an apartment in Kansas City, teaching primary school. The hunter calls for help with translations and the angel calls to tell him stories, stories about children, about her new human life and the terror she feels sometimes in the grocery store, alone in the parking lot at the mall, when she can’t hear anything but human voices and the idling of car engines. For those who chose to stay it is a kind of exile, and a kind of freedom, depending on what kind of day they’ve had. Castiel knows. He wonders what they’ll say to her, if hers is the number they dial: will they trick her into coming here, into gathering others? Into exposing their fragile network? He knows that Sam will come, if they threaten Castiel’s life. That is what Sam is. Castiel cannot let this happen. He gropes in the dark, flexes his bruised fingers, works his thumb under one of the ropes. Twists until he can feel his shoulder nearly give and pop. He wobbles in his chair, and finds one leg weaker than the others. He shakes it hard, shakes in his seat until the chair starts to creak and sway a little. His own legs are tied, but not tightly enough: he can stand in a crouch now, hobble sideways. He makes it to the window, and sees that there’s no car on the gravel drive: there’s just a single light aimed at the shabby porch, a single beam of yellow glare. He doesn’t know how long he has, or how long it is until dawn. If he could make it to the road, he could be seen by a trucker, a state trooper or a ranger, somebody with a camper van. Anyone. 

Castiel braces himself and exhales, and then throws himself backwards onto the board floor. The chair cracks under him, and so does his wrist. The angle was wrong. Castiel cries out and rolls off his arm, and lies there for a second panting, seeing stars. And when he can breathe again he rolls until he can pulls his knees up a little bit, until he is almost standing, and he throws himself down again. The chair back splits and Castiel tips over onto the floor, pain striking lightning up his arm and down into his swollen hands. He kicks and squirms until he’s free of the chair, and then he rolls his arms and twists until he’s worked most of the ropes off, shedding them like bloody strings. He slides his arm free and unties his feet, one-handed. 

Castiel stands up. And sits down again right away, folded onto his knees for a second, clutching his broken wrist to his chest, his head emptying like a balloon. He breathes fast at first and then more slowly. He thinks. He gets up again.

There are two choices: stay and fight here, or run. But he’s without salt or spray paint: he can’t trap them, can’t keep them out. There is almost nothing in the house, which is more of a shack set on low stilts. There’s a kitchenette with two chairs and a broken table. Castiel takes the dingy little tablecloth and rolls it, ties the ends in a knot and loops it around his neck, puts his arm through, taking the pressure off his wrist. He rinses his mouth and face with water from the pump sink, drinks some out of one cupped hand. It tastes incredible. He is alive, and he’s not thirsty anymore. These are two things he has. And then, three: he finds his parka by the door. There’s nothing else here from the car. Evidently they couldn’t get past the devil’s trap, or didn’t care to try. He puts the parka on one arm and closes the snaps across his chest. It’s stopped raining outside but the ground is still wet and glistening. They’ll be able to track him if he runs, through the mud. They’ll find him again, and-

"Stop," he says, out loud, to himself. "Stop." He closes his eyes. These seem like tactical doubts, strategic assessments of his situation. He knows that he was very good at those. But now there is fear, too. A different kind of fear, one that burns at his threadbare ends. It would be easier if Dean were here, Sam. He longs to hear someone else say, _here’s what we’re going to do_. I got this. We got this. _I got you_. Castiel opens his eyes. There is no one else here. He takes a busted chair leg, the one with the sharpest point, and tucks it up into his sleeve. His hands curl around the wood as if it were a sword, as if he was not broken. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Castiel says. 

Castiel goes out the door and into the woods, staying just out of sight from the driveway, following it out towards the road. He walks in darkness, letting his eyes adjust. The air’s cold on his cheeks and in his lungs, his mouth. He still tastes blood when he licks his lips. He walks quickly but doesn’t run, mindful of the rocks and tangled roots. There’s a moon overhead, a sliver of light between the clouds that have slipped apart, emptied themselves, and drifted away. The night’s cool and still and almost silent. At the point where the driveway finally curves up to meet the road, Castiel sees headlights. He freezes and gets down to watch. Someone, the taller one, the man, gets out of the car and holds an arm above his head, and then lowers his hand close to his face. There’s a tiny light in his palm. It’s Castiel’s cellphone. He hears a woman’s voice, faintly, and then the other demon is getting back into the car. As Castiel watches, the car idles for a minute and then pulls into the lane, makes a slow u-turn, and screeches away, taillights wavering in the distance and then disappearing. Castiel stands still for a minute and then feels himself smiling, feels himself laughing, sort of thinly and helplessly, shaking without making much sound. His shitty cellphone. His shitty cellphone, bought from the kiosk at Rite Aid. They can’t get a good enough signal to make the call. They’ll have to drive until they find a spot. Castiel tilts his head back and looks at the clearing sky for a moment, at the moon above the pine tops. At nothing but darkness, and the first faint stars.

And then he keeps moving.

 

 

 

 

The prayers of demons aren’t different. He hadn’t known. How could he? He’d never even wondered. But in those first days, in the midst of the panic, holding together the last scraps of his grace, there’d been that terrible silence and then, in the middle of the night, just that word. Just his name, murmured into the dark. No sulphur and brimstone, no cold fire, no chill and no unholy heat behind that word: nothing different, nothing strange, only sadder, only fainter, drawing off into the distance, pulling away from shore. The same voice. So familiar. Low, like a whisper. It used to tug at him in purgatory, incessantly, like a thread tied to one finger: _come back_. I’m here. Where are you?

Castiel had driven two days and a night and found him outside Tulsa. He’d been killing demons, and not quickly: apparently there’d been a falling out with Crowley and now there was a small war, spilling out over the borders of hell, coloring the ground. Dean had laughed at him for coming, called it a moment of weakness, called it a trap, and when Castiel wouldn’t rise to the bait he’d raged, and then he’d broken and offered the blade to Castiel, begged him to do it. And Castiel couldn’t. Wouldn’t.

"Don’t let me stay like this," Dean had said. His eyes were black but he was crying a little, fat tears that welled and spilled down his cheeks. "Don’t damn me."

"You’re not damned," Castiel had said. "You’re not damned." He’d cupped Dean’s face between his hands. Maybe it was just that he couldn’t see it, that his own grace was so rotted and spent that the veils of the world were already being pulled down. Maybe his senses were now too dulled to reveal it: the spoiling demon flesh behind the human shell. But Dean’s skin had been warm and solid between his hands, freckled, flushed from shouting, alive and real and beautiful, still a miracle, the same body Castiel once made whole from earth and stars. If there was true evil in his being Castiel couldn’t find it, maybe love had finally made him blind.

"I can’t stop," Dean said. "I’m getting worse."

"There will be another way." And there had been, eventually. But not before Laramie. Not before Rock Springs. They hadn’t been fast enough, smart enough. It wasn’t only demons anymore. And then Castiel was human and burned-out, and Sam and the angels were on the move, and then came Sioux Falls and the end of spring. And Dean was human again, and then Dean was gone. Castiel knows it’s his fault. If he had killed Dean Winchester then Dean Winchester would not have cut a path through south Wyoming, Dean would not have run away into the wilderness of the world, a penitent fleeing himself. Castiel has accepted the guilt, lying in bed for months through the fall and the winter, awake at night when Sam was sleeping. He has killed other Deans: he remembers the white room, even if no one else does. It would have been the work of a moment, up under the ribs, into the heart. Dean might have been grateful. But Castiel made his choice and he does not regret it, he would not undo it even if God himself returned in glory and turned the knife to Castiel, handle first.

In the woods outside of Fairbanks, walking the night through the cold, hallucinating shapes behind the trees, pulling his hood tighter and stumbling over the pine roots, Castiel remembers that single prayer. It was like an arrow of fire struck into his center, a transverberation, crashing ecstasy in the midst of agony. _Cas_ , he thinks. That was it, all of it. The last prayer he will ever hear. It is stamped into him like a seal. He finally understands what it is to long and hope and bargain that way, here from the opposite end of the chain, where there are no answers anywhere. The world seems deaf and you are screaming. You wish someone knew.

Castiel closes his eyes and breathes through his nose and thinks, _Dean_ , with all his heart. The arrow still inside him vibrates, like the string of a bow.

 

 

 

 

There is nobody on the road, whatever this road is, not a single pair of headlights for an hour or more. He hikes along it anyway until he’s too tired to keep going, until his head is heavy and his eyes swim. While it’s still dark he finds a hunter’s shack half a mile from the road, cobwebbed and padlocked. He takes a rock and bashes the padlock until it snaps, and then he crawls inside and lies down on the floor. There are tarps and an old moth-eaten blanket inside a trunk and he pulls them over and around himself, shivering a little, working awkwardly with one hand to build a kind of nest. He sinks into it. It smells like mold and decay and mouse urine, but it doesn’t matter. His arm throbs, but that doesn’t matter, either. He falls asleep almost immediately. When he wakes up the sun is just rising, soft gold against the frame and glass, light falling in pieces like snow through the dirty windows. 

There’s an old ammunition canister in the shed, and when he opens it, he finds a desiccated bag of jerky and some plastic shotgun shells and a pack of playing cards with nude women on them. As hungry as he is, he leaves the jerky alone. He digs in the bottom of the canister and finds a folded state map, stained and creased. Castiel unfolds it on the floor and turns it over, finds the enlarged section that shows Fairbanks and the surrounding areas, something marked the Chena River Recreation Area. There is a small circle drawn in red at one edge. He traces the roads beside it with one finger, trying to remember how far he came last night, what direction the moon was in, where the sun rose. He’s not certain but he thinks he might be there, on the red circle, right here in this deserted shack. He spans the distance between the mark and the hot springs with his thumbnail, measures it by scale. He might be less than ten miles away. There will be people and a telephone, there will be food. He’s still got a roll of cash inside one of the half-dozen pockets of his parka. He can warn Sam.

Before he leaves he prays to Hannah. His mind’s clearer than last night. He tells her what’s happened, where he is, where he’s headed. Warns her that if she sends anyone, they should be cautious: he doesn’t know if there will be more gathering now, now that the trail’s fresh. He doesn’t know what she’ll do. He doesn’t mention Dean at all. They are still angry with him. He killed angels. Just like Castiel did, before. Hannah might send someone to help him, find him. Or she might not. This is praying, he supposes. He wonders how Dean did it, all those years. All those times he got no answer. 

Castiel puts the map in his pocket and aims himself east.

 

 

.


	3. Chapter 3

By the time the sun's all the way up his stomach is rumbling. Castiel scans the sparse ground cover as he walks, and not far from the road he finds a patch of chickweed spreading out down the little embankment. He gathers it in handfuls, shakes the dirt off as best he can, and eats the leaves. They're green and tender and they take the edge off his thirst a little bit. He grabs more and stuffs some of it into his pockets for later. If he lives, he could plant chickweed in the garden at the bunker, alongside the carrots and squash and herbs they have now. He hopes Sam's been watering them. He worries about his bean plants for a second and then feels ridiculous. _Priorities_ , he thinks, tiredly.

In the distance he catches the sound of an engine: something big, a truck or a trailer. He goes back behind the trees to watch it coming, just in case. But it's not the battered SUV the demons were driving. It's a pickup truck, blue with a wide silver stripe, an older model, boxy and square-nosed. Castiel steps out closer to the gravel at the edge of the road and puts one hand up. He waves it back and forth, slowly. The busted chair leg is still shoved into his coat sleeve. He knows what he looks like, what a mess he probably is. He tries to smile and look as nonthreatening as possible. He should have undone his coat all the way, so that they could see the broken wrist, so he could appeal to their pity. He waves and the truck slows down a little bit. There's a bright glint on the windshield but he thinks it's a man, a broad-shouldered shape in the driver's seat. Far off he can see another truck coming around the curve, still a mile or so away. One of them will have to stop. Castiel thinks about what to say: I've had an accident, maybe. Crashed my car. He can say that he's lost. It's true enough. The truck pulls slowly to the side of the road and stops about thirty yards away. The engine turns off but nobody gets out. Castiel takes a couple of steps closer and then stops: a spike of fear goes through him, vibrating his nerves. He lowers his arm and the chair leg slides down into his grasp. The truck door opens and a man gets out, a sunburned man in a barn coat, the demon that bloodied his face last night.

"Goin' my way?" the demon calls out, grinning, and Castiel turns and runs into the woods. 

His legs pump and his heart thunders, he runs between the trees and through the rocks. They'll have to follow him on foot, leave the truck behind. There's only one, he thinks, and then remembers the second truck coming down the bend. They split up. They split up to find him, they stole different cars, how could he have been so stupid? He jumps a fallen log, rotting into the ground, and almost stumbles. He might outrun them, might lose them in the wild. And if he can't- his hand grips the chair leg tighter. He's awake this time, and loose. Outnumbered, but he hasn't forgotten how to hold a spear, no matter how crude. If he can get them down, he can still exorcise them. He can try. He hears someone else crashing through the woods behind him and tries to run faster, but his lungs are burning. He trips over a rock and goes sprawling, rolling over his bad arm. He struggles up and moves again, darting over a tiny brook, choked with leaves. But he slips on the mud and staggers back, trying to grab hold of a tree root. And then the demon's on him, dragging at the hood of his parka, pulling him backwards towards the stream. Castiel twists to thrust upward and stabs the point of the chair leg as hard as he can into the demon's eye, pushes viciously as it cries out and tears at him. He wrenches his clumsy spear back out again and the demon shrieks and puts both hands over its face, falls back onto the dirt, howling things that are barely words. Castiel kicks him in the ribs and the demon rolls down into the water, moaning. Castiel hears somebody else coming fast, cracking over falling branches- a shape moving through the trees. He wipes the bloodied chair leg on his pants and steadies himself. He won't make it easy for them.

Somebody comes crashing through the bushes: they stop at the top of the rise and Castiel stares, and then he feels his fingers lose their grip and the chair leg goes rolling away.

"Dean," he says.

Dean stares at him and doesn't say anything at all. He looks down at the demon and the bloody chair leg, back up at Castiel's face. His eyes are wide and stunned. He is looking at Castiel like he's a ghost. Castiel walks across the narrow stream, boots sloshing, and climbs up the hill and Dean holds his hand out, pulls him up, and then Castiel wraps his good arm around Dean's neck and hangs there, breathing short and shallow into Dean's coat. Dean smells like dirt and car exhaust and clean laundry. Castiel closes his eyes and presses his face into Dean's shoulder, tries not to think about his throbbing arm caught between them. He holds Dean tight and after a second, Dean's hand comes up, curls gently at the back of Castiel's neck. Dean holds onto him, too. He's shaking. Castiel doesn't know why.

"Cas," he says, wonderingly. He presses his cheek to Castiel's scalp. "You're okay," he says, and repeats it in a murmur, like he is reassuring himself. He leans back to look at Castiel's face, one hand warm against Castiel's cheek. "Are you okay?" he asks, hesitantly. Castiel shakes his head and Dean puts an arm up to steady him, but he hits the wrong point, grips in just the wrong place, and Castiel hisses. "Whoa," Dean says. He lets go. He looks down at Castiel's undone coat flap, at the tablecloth sling, and his face goes tight with rage. "Jesus _Christ_ ," he says. He looks back at the demon, who is still streaming blood from a punctured eye socket, now trying to clamber away up the bank. "He did all this?"

"Some," says Castiel.

Dean takes the knife out of his belt.

 

 

 

 

Dean drives him to the emergency room in Fairbanks, doing ninety on single lane roads until they reach the city. They take Castiel in and give him x-rays, put a cast on his wrist. They clean up the cuts on his face and arms, shine a light into his eyes to check for a concussion. They tell him he probably won't need surgery, that the break is clean, that it should heal alright as long as he stops crashing cars when it rains.

"Believe me, I've seen worse," his nurse says. She gives him a paper cup of painkillers and a plastic cup of water. Dean brings him a bag of granola bars from the cafeteria and Castiel eats them greedily, one after the other, until Dean cuts him off. After they've written Castiel a prescription for more painkillers Dean sneaks them out through the loading dock and drives them to a pharmacy on the other side of town. He fills Castiel's prescription while Castiel sits in the truck staring up at the roof, because the pills have kicked in and the world is slowly draining away at the edges. Castiel dozes for ten minutes and dreams vividly about being the size of a pebble, shorter than chickweed, about reaching his tiny arms up to brush against the underside of leaves. He startles awake when Dean unlocks the door. 

They drive out of town past the hot springs, past the woods. Castiel watches the miles roll away in minutes, the acres and acres he hiked in the dark, bleeding and afraid, now bare and quiet in daylight. They drive into the hills and Dean takes them up a back road, tires spitting gravel. He turns into a dirt track and when the trees part there's a cabin with a couple of rusted out appliances stuck into the yard. The Impala's under a tarp a little ways off, parked under a wooden frame with a metal roof, something that probably used to shelter animals. Dean helps him out of the car and up the steps and inside, helps him peel out of his coat and get onto the sofa. Dean unties Castiel's muddy bootlaces and pulls his boots off and Castiel stretches out on the sofa and falls asleep again, this time for hours. He wakes up in the middle of the night and sits up trembling, listening for noise: for a second he was back in the hunter's shack, smelling mouse shit and old kerosene, and they'd found him. But he's under an afghan and his arm's only a dull ache and the room smells sweet and pungent like a wood fire, burning low in the potbellied stove on the other side of the room. Dean is there, snoring in an armchair with his feet propped up on a crate. Castiel stares at him in the dark for a long time, until his eyes slip down again, and then his shoulders. When he wakes up for real, in the first hours of morning, he hears a rhythmic thunking noise outside, something heavy splitting wood. Castiel pads over to look out the window. Dean's in a thermal and a flannel shirt, swinging the axe over his head, chopping firewood. Castiel watches the axe go up again and again, watches him put it down at last and gather up the split logs. He comes back into the cabin with an armful and sees Castiel at the window. He looks like he doesn't know what to say.

"Wrist okay?" Dean asks, finally. 

"Better," Castiel says. 

"Stomach okay?" Dean says. "Painkillers can really rip you up." Castiel shakes his head. "Good." Dean stands there for another minute and then drops the wood into the bucket by the stove. He opens the door with a hot mitt and sticks a couple of logs in: they pop and snap and spark, and Dean closes it up. He looks at Castiel again, and then away, too quickly. "You want breakfast?"

"Dean," Castiel says, and Dean's eyes crawl up to meet his. "How did you find me?"

"Got a message," he says. 

"You don't answer that phone anymore," Castiel says, and Dean turns around, scrubs at the back of his head with both hands. 

"Yeah," he says. "Well." He digs into his jeans pocket and pulls a phone out, thumbs through it for a second. He holds the screen up for Castiel. It's a picture message. Of Castiel tied in that chair, last night, before he woke up. In that picture, Castiel looks like a corpse. Dean's arm shakes and he takes the phone back, shoves it into his pocket. "I, uh, I turned on your GPS. I knew they had your phone, so. I thought if you, if you were still-" he says, and stops. "I can make you some eggs," he says. 

"I have to call Sam," Castiel says. "If they sent that to you-"

"Already did," Dean says. "I called him at the hospital. He knows. He said Hannah reached him last night. He's on his way, he's gonna pick you up in Whitehorse."

"Pick me up," Castiel repeats, slowly. "Dean."

"I've got some ham," Dean says. "No potatoes, though. I can make toast."

"Dean, look at me." 

"We don't have to talk about it," Dean says. "I can just make you breakfast, you can take a nap. We don't have to do this."

"I do," Castiel says. Dean turns around with a frying pan dangling from one hand. "I don't want to go back without you," he says. "I came here to find you. To bring you home."

"Cas-"

"I came here to tell you that I love you," Castiel says, and Dean actually rocks backwards, until he is leaning against the pump sink. 

"You can't," Dean says. His voice is cracking. "You need to get the fuck away from me. Look, look at this." He gestures with the frying pan towards Castiel's busted wrist. "This is what happens. This is what you get with me, Cas, this is the shit I bring, this is what I _am_. The things I did- you _know_ the things I did. Christ. I'm never gonna- the shit that rains on me, it's always gonna be there. It's never going to end."

"This isn't-"

"It _is_ my fault, it _is_ ," Dean yells. "It is my fucking fault, do you get it? I can't be near you and I can't be away from you, I can't do anything fucking right!" He tosses the frying pan onto the floor and puts his face over his hands, runs them over the top of his head, sucking in huge mouthfuls of air like he can't breathe. Castiel comes closer and Dean puts a hand out to stop him. "No," he says. "No. I'm gonna drive you to Whitehorse, or you can take a bus, or whatever you want. I'll take you there, you'll meet Sam, and that, that'll be it. Okay? That'll be it."

"Not for me," says Castiel. Dean closes his eyes. For one terrible second Castiel remembers them blackened and wrong, dark irises spreading starless and deep, to swallow all the color in the world. The painkillers are dizzying. He's afraid, absurdly. But then Dean lifts his eyes to Castiel again, green and human, red-rimmed. He looks like a hurt child.

"I don't want to do it like this," he says. He bends down and picks up the frying pan, wiping it with his fingers. "Can we just have a day? Before you go?" He holds the edges of the pan, so hard his knuckles whiten. "I don't want to fight with you. But I can't go back. I can't. Please don't ask me again." Castiel doesn't know what to tell him, what to say. He doesn't know what to do except to stand there by the window and look at the floor, and at Dean's boots, and try to remember all the things he wanted to explain, the things he turned over and over in his mind during all those months, all that absent, emptied time.

"Okay," he says, instead. "Eggs." Dean's face softens, though his eyes are still red.

"Scrambled?" he says. "I can do over easy. I don't know how you like them."

Dean makes him scrambled eggs, dry, with green peppers and onions cut into them and fried until their skins are crisp and sweating. He makes rye toast and strong coffee and they sit together and eat at the little kitchen table. Their knees almost knock against one another beneath it. Castiel asks questions about the cabin- rented from somebody who used to bowhunt up here, a guy who used to know a guy Dean used to know- and about the truck, hot-wired. Dean offers to go find the wrecked car and get Castiel's stuff out of it, and Castiel thinks about that. He goes to his parka and digs around in the pockets, finds the pebble from Calgary in one of them, untouched. He asks Dean to open one hand and Dean does it without asking why. Castiel drops the pebble into his palm and says, embarrassed,

"It's from Calgary." Dean turns it over.

"Um," he says. "Thanks."

"Sam said you- the Olympics," Castiel says. "You never got to watch."

"What?" Dean looks up, and back down at the rock in his hand. "Like, when we were kids?" He rolls the pebble on the top of the table. "Okay, that's pretty cool."

"I didn't want to come with nothing," Castiel says. Dean stares up at him.

"You're enough," Dean says. "For me."

 

 

 

 

There is the couch and an air mattress with a duct-taped hole in one side. Dean insists Castiel take the couch again. That night the painkillers put him to sleep but he wakes up dry-mouthed in the middle of the night, aching a little. He stares down at Dean, slumped on top of the sinking mattress, a blanket pulled down off his shoulder. All the times he sat and watched this happen, watched Dean's chest rise and fall, sitting perfectly still in dusty motel rooms and waiting for him to wake up. He didn't hurt then and he didn't need a drink of water. He didn't appreciate it, maybe. He could be invisible if he wished, he could sit beside Dean in the car or watch him brush his teeth, he could do all those things if he wanted to, he could have been with Dean in every moment, every hour. But he wasn't. He stayed away and stayed away, thinking that was best. And now if Dean's grief has its way there will be no more of this. No more watching his face slacken and soften as he slips out of consciousness, no more listening for the soft sigh of breath, the grumbling twitch that means he's dreaming. 

Castiel climbs off the couch and onto the air mattress, and Dean wakes up as Castiel is pulling the blanket up over them both with his good hand. "Cas," he says, startled, and then, " _Cas_."

Castiel kisses him and Dean kisses back, presses him into the air mattress until it wheezes and deflates and they laugh and keep going. Dean kisses him and promises desperately to make it good, to make it good for him, to give him anything he wants. But all Castiel wants is him, him always, him until there is nothing left of the world, and then after, too. So he just pulls Dean down and opens his knees to fit Dean against him, to arch up and murmur his name when Dean's hands slip under his waistband. Dean kisses his throat and makes him come and Castiel returns the favor, sort of fumblingly, one-handed. But Dean sighs and trembles and comes hard anyway, starry-eyed afterwards, curling into Castiel like he is spinning a cocoon. They lie awake for a while, not talking. Dean falls asleep first and Castiel follows him, dreaming in Enochian about finding the edge of the world. It's flat and water spills over the side eternally, in raging torrents.

In the morning Dean pulls the tarps off the Impala and loads the car. "Hey, why not ride in style," he says. He acts like he's trying to stay away from Castiel, like he's trying not to touch him, keeping himself busy moving bags and things into the car, closing up the cabin. But then he crowds Castiel against the passenger door and kisses him breathlessly, hand wrapped around Castiel's sleeve. Afterwards he pulls back and says, "Sorry," and gets into the car. Castiel slides into the opposite seat. He doesn't know what else to do. But there has to be something. Something that will change this. "You want some music?" Dean asks. 

They drive. And Castiel thinks.

 

 

.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Warning: this chapter contains a discussion of suicidal thoughts.**

Sam won’t reach Whitehorse for another day and a half, so Dean checks them into a motel at the edge of town and comes back to the car with the room key. He’s twisting it around and around on one finger. He parks them in front and carries the bags in, and then stands next to the single queen bed and says, awkwardly, “Is this okay?” Castiel stares at him.

"I don’t know what to tell you," Castiel says, "that I haven’t already." Dean’s face screws up.

"What does that mean?"

Castiel sighs and looks at the ceiling for a second, and then pulls Dean into a kiss, tangles his fingers in the short hair at the back of Dean’s neck. Dean kisses him back hungrily, desperately, handsy and intent. He’s tender with Castiel’s wrist and lies back on the bed so that Castiel can straddle his legs: when Castiel rolls down into him Dean’s head falls back and his mouth makes a soft _o_ , his breath comes out in hitched little sighs. His hand tugs against Castiel’s hip, his side, pulls him close so that he can stretch over Dean, bear him down and kiss Dean’s throat. Castiel never quite imagined him like this, in all the ways he imagined him: sometimes he was sure and sometimes he was nervous, sometimes sweet and sometimes hard, but Castiel never knew he’d be so. So bare like this, letting everything go. Castiel didn’t know this part of him, couldn’t see it before. But he knows why he’s seeing it now, why Dean can’t get enough of him, why the single bed and Dean’s hands everywhere, cupping his face to kiss it, spanning his back to get him closer, closer. The postcards were leaks, cracks by which little bits of himself seeped out. Now a dam has burst. Humans do this: feast or famine, carnival before Lent. He knows this is Dean’s goodbye. It makes him sad and it makes him furious, it breaks Castiel’s already shattering heart.

It isn’t fair.

Dean gets them take-out sandwiches and they watch motel television and Dean lies against him, head on Castiel’s shoulder, dozing, with one hand still knotted in Castiel’s shirtfront. Castiel is almost asleep too, when Dean starts mumbling to himself and twitching. Castiel rubs his shoulder to settle him and Dean kicks out, rolls over, flailing, and tips off the side of the bed. His eye are open but he’s crawling away backwards, clumsily, terrified, until his head hits the wall and he sits there, panting and shaking, staring into the distance like he can’t see the motel, can’t see Castiel crouched beside him, asking if he’s alright.

"Dean," he says. He holds his hand out and Dean bares his teeth. "Dean, it’s me. It was a dream." Dean’s eyes focus on the end of the bed and then slide over to Castiel, slowly. Dean blinks.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, okay."

Dean gets up and locks himself in the bathroom and Castiel waits, and then Dean comes out and takes his coat off the back of the chair and says, “I’m gonna get some air.” Castiel reaches for him and Dean puts both hands up, backs away. “I’m fine,” he says. “I’m fine.”

"Dean."

"I’ll be back," Dean says, and goes.

Hours go by: evening creeps down and cars pull into the lot and Castiel goes to the window every time. But none of them are Dean. Eventually Castiel calls Sam with the new cell phone Dean bought him at the drugstore.

"Cas?" Sam says. Castiel can hear the speakerphone echoing in the car. "Hey. Good to hear your voice. How’re you feeling?"

"I think Dean’s gone," Castiel says. "I think he left me here."

"What?" Sam asks. "Where?" Castiel gives him the motel address. "You okay for right now? You got something to eat? Any money?" Castiel looks over at the table, where Dean dropped his keys and his bag in the morning. He’s taken them both, but there’s still a wad of cash sitting next to the motel’s take-out menus, left there from when Dean paid for lunch. He wonders if Dean forgot it, or if this is what he planned to do all along. To slip away without a word, a final look. The thought makes him cold inside.

"I’m fine," he says.

"Good," Sam says. "I’ll be there by tomorrow night. Just stay put."

"Thank you," Castiel says. There’s a short silence, and then he can hear Sam exhale in a puff, like he’s frustrated.

"You don’t have to thank me," Sam says. "Just take care of yourself. Okay? See you soon."

So Castiel sits at the head of the bed and stares at the television until his eyes blur, and then he turns it off and itches his face and his growing beard with one hand. He finds that he’s crying. He sits and lets it happen, he doesn’t try to stop. He’s tired, so tired his bones ache and his heart burns in his chest, his head feels heavy and his eyes are hot. He’s heard all those useless derogatory phrases about being a man, manning up. He knows that many people believe that someone who looks like he does- tall and broad-shouldered, scruffy, someone in dirty jeans who knows how to land a punch- shouldn’t sit in a motel room and cry because they’re alone, because they hurt, because nobody is going to put an arm around them and say that it’ll be okay, nobody is going to kiss the side of their face and say _I’m here_ , I’m here, maybe nobody will ever do that again. But he is human, and fragile, and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care at all. He tried, he tried and now he gets to go home with nothing, he gets to go home in pieces. He cries silently, he sits and rubs the tears off his face with the cuff of his sleeve. He doesn’t feel like it will ever stop, and then it does.

In the middle of the night something comes onto the bed: from a restless sleep Castiel snaps to consciousness, rolls over and finds Dean sitting on his knees on the mattress. Dean’s eyes are red, too. Blearily, waking, Castiel thinks: we’re a matched set. Like the infomercial pans.

"I’m sorry," he says. "I’m sorry, I’m sorry." Castiel gathers him up. "I was gonna leave," Dean says, miserably, into his arms. "I was just gonna leave you here, I should have. If I was stronger- I should have left you here, you’re better without me, you and Sam, you’re safer."

"That’s not true."

"I should have killed myself," Dean says, and Castiel freezes. Dean doesn’t seem to notice: he lets out a gasp, like a sob, into Castiel’s shoulder. "I should have killed myself before I killed anyone else." Castiel pushes back to look at him and Dean shakes his head. "Don’t. You know it’s true."

"No," Castiel says, and then, "don’t ask me to say that. Don’t ask me to put a price on your life." Castiel rubs his thumb on Dean’s cheek. "You know what I choose. I used to think I knew, what was more important. One life or a dozen lives. Do you remember? One broken seal or a whole town full of children."

"It’s different."

"Is it?" Castiel asks. "I’m not an angel anymore. I don’t claim to know what’s righteous. I’m not holy. I don’t know if I ever was."

"You were," Dean says. "You are."

"I killed people. Humans. And my own kind. I pretended to be God. You can’t imagine the things I did."

"That wasn’t you."

"It was a door I opened," Castiel says. "It was my fault. When I dream about it they’re my hands."

"Jesus," Dean says. He turns his face away, like he’s going to be sick. For a minute he doesn’t say anything. "I see them all the time," Dean says, finally, softly. "I dream about it. I see myself in the mirror and I think- Cas, do you ever-"

"Yes," Castiel says.

"How do you live with it?" Dean asks. "I remember what you said. That time with the Looney Tunes guy, you said you- all the angels. I remember." Dean swallows hard. "How did you decide to just- go on?" Castiel pulls him in and kisses his cheek, and Dean closes his eyes for a second, turns into it unconsciously, lifts his face like a flower to sun. So there is something in him still living, still hoping. He can’t even hide it. He’s still beautiful inside, Castiel believes that. His eyes no longer see those things, the shapes under the flesh. But Castiel doesn’t need to: Dean has always worn his soul like a banner, bright and waving. No matter how torn. When he opens his eyes Castiel smiles at him.

"Sometimes it’s you," Castiel says, and Dean’s face goes perfectly still, soft with awe. He didn’t know, Castiel thinks. How could he not know? "Sometimes it’s Sam. Or Hannah, my brothers and sisters. Sometimes it’s something that needs to be done. The dishes," he says. "The garden. And other days," Castiel trails off, and shrugs. "I have no fucking idea." Dean’s shaky smile splits and he smacks Castiel lightly on his good arm.

"What the fuck," Dean says. "When the fuck did you learn how to swear?"

"I’ve been busy," Castiel says.

 

 

 

 

When Sam pulls into the motel parking lot Dean and Castiel are sitting on the railing out front, drinking coffee. They wave and Sam gets out of the car. He stares at Dean as he walks up and then his eyes go over to Castiel for a second, silently curious. Castiel nods at him, and then Sam’s eyes go back to Dean. Anchor there. His face is wondering, cautious.

"Hey," Dean says. He looks down at his coffee, at Castiel. Sideways at Sam, like he doesn’t dare meet his eyes. Castiel understands. For Dean, Sam will always be, at least a little bit, the child he raised. Dean is afraid to meet his judgment. "Good drive?" Dean asks, awkwardly. Sam stares at him for a minute.

"No."

"No?" Dean echoes.

"It takes like fifty hours, Dean," Sam says. "Give me a break." His mouth is turning up at the corners, and so Dean’s does too, like a reflection. Dean looks between Sam and Castiel, at both of them starting to grin.

"Couple of smartasses," Dean says. "I leave you alone for like a minute," he starts, and then Sam bear-hugs him abruptly and Dean drops his coffee, and they cling to each other until they can’t breathe. Dean slaps Sam’s back when he lets go, pats his sleeve. "Okay," he says. "Okay. So, you ready to go, or-"

"For Christ’s sake," Sam says. "No. I need a nap. On whatever you’ve got that’s flat."

"Uh," Dean says. "Sure." They go inside and Sam doesn’t say anything about the single bed and the rumpled sheets, the two pillows pulled together in the middle of the mattress. He just flops face-down onto it and sighs with delight. His legs hang off the end and Dean prods at them with one foot. "You hungry?" he asks.

"Later," Sam says, and rolls over.

After Sam wakes up, Castiel volunteers to walk to the convenience store just down the street, to grab bagels and more coffee and maybe fruit, if they have fruit. Dean stares at him like he’s an invalid and says no way, how could he possibly carry anything with his cast on? Dean will go, Dean will drive.

"I’m not helpless," Castiel hisses. Dean starts to protest, and Castiel cuts him off. He takes the room key right out of Dean’s hand and Dean’s coat off the chair. He looks at Sam. "I’ll be right back." He isn’t. Castiel walks slowly, chats with the cashier, selects the three most perfect apples in the display. He buys packaged muffins and a tray of small coffees. The cashier helps him put the bag over his arm and hands him the tray afterwards. And Castiel walks back slowly along the sidewalk, looking upwards at the birds sitting on telephone wires and the trees rustling in the wind. The air is cold but good, though he doesn’t feel the chill through Dean’s coat. When he comes back Dean and Sam are sitting side by side on the bed, talking in low voices. Dean’s nodding. Sam looks up at Castiel and smiles. Dean looks up, too. There are tear tracks drying on his face. Castiel feels the arrow again, right in the core of him, in the heart.

"Perfect timing," Sam says.

 

 

 

 

They’re on the road to Edmonton when Dean’s cell phone vibrates. It’s still in the front pocket of Dean’s coat, which is still wrapped around Castiel. He’s been dozing in the backseat while Dean drives and Sam changes radio stations, complaining that he can’t find the news.

"There’s no news," Dean says, skeptically. "We’re still in Canada."

"They have news in Canada," Sam says.

Castiel takes the phone out of his pocket and looks at it. It vibrates again in his hand. Someone’s calling Dean. It takes him a moment to recognize his own number. He feels numb at that. Dean glances back into the rear-view mirror. He must see the light of the tiny screen because he says,

"Somebody calling me?"

"It’s my number," Castiel says.

"Butt dial?"

"My old number," Castiel says, slowly, and Dean’s head swivels around for a second, and the car jerks.

"Fuck," Dean says. "Motherfuckers. Give me that." He holds his hand over the back of the seat, but Castiel’s already pressed the button that answers the call, and he’s putting it up to his ear. "Cas," Dean says.

"Hello," Castiel says, into the phone.

"Hey there, angelcakes," she says. The demon’s voice is tinny on the line, broken with static. "Do me a favor. Put the big guy on."

"No," Castiel says.

"Loosen up, kiddo. We had some fun, didn’t we?" In the front seat, Dean is turning around, face rigid, gesturing at Castiel to hang up. Sam’s telling him to keep his eyes on the road.

"No," Castiel says. "We didn’t. But I have a message for you."

"Oh, really."

"Give up," Castiel says. "You’ve already failed."

"You pompous little-"

"I’ve destroyed thousands of your kind," Castiel says. "So you know this is no idle threat." There’s a brief silence on the other end. He wonders what she’s thinking. He’s not sure he cares. "If you come for him, I’ll kill you," he says. He hangs up and takes the battery out of the back of the phone, slides out the chip, and crushes it between his fingers. He throws the plastic case and everything else out the window of the car. When he looks up Sam is staring at him over the back of the bench seat.

"What," Dean says. He looks over his shoulder again and the car lurches a little over the line. "What’s going on? Are you still on the phone?"

"No," says Castiel.

"Is everything okay?" Dean asks. "Who the hell was it? Was it them?"

"Everything’s fine," Castiel says. It’s his favorite kind of mundane lie: the one that reassures. It’s not really a lie, exactly. More like a hope. A whole-hearted wish. Castiel settles back against the seat and pulls the coat back over his shoulder, leans his head back against the seat. He can hear Dean and Sam talking in the front, Dean still asking who was on the phone, Sam telling him to worry about it later, because there’s a turn coming up. Castiel thinks about going home: about the bed that Castiel fixed, the clean sheets on it, the kitchen table with its basket of fruit, the files he left half-sorted, his running shoes abandoned on the mat. He thinks about Dean sliding his shoes off and kicking them under the table, opening the refrigerator, sprawling in one of the chairs. Dean beside him in the dark, breathing evenly. About Sam driving to the farmer’s market next weekend, the phones ringing, the garden full of weeds. Castiel thinks about tomorrow and the day after that. If Dean needs reasons, Castiel will give them to him in handfuls, by the bushel. Castiel will help if he can. He doesn’t know how broken they are, if they can ever be put right. But perhaps _right_ is not the word for such imperfect creatures. They are stronger together. They always have been, they always will be. They will survive. Castiel will make sure of it. 

Dean switches the radio station and finds a song he knows: Castiel can hear him singing along, faintly, hesitantly, under his breath. Sam taps his fingers on the car door.

Castiel closes his eyes and listens.

 

 

.


End file.
